DSorrow

Planning and optimizing builds. It's probably something people don't really hate, but I'd guess many people don't particularly care for tinkering with Pine's themselves while I just happen to enjoy it almost as much as playing the game.

This every single time. How long am I supposed to deal with the once in 5 minute waves? Hoping this was fixed on Homecoming, I actually waited 20 minutes the first time I did it here but then decided to just let the Fir Bolg go before I lost my sanity. Sometimes I'll also intentionally fail missions if they are particularly annoying or if I just want to speed up the completion of a story arc.

AFK farming? Get a farm map with wandering mobs, put your AoEs on autocast and the only thing you really need to do is reset the map every now and then. Totally compatible with multi-boxing as you could run regular content on your main account while you reset your farmer between missions.

This all sounds like an awfully complex change to implement in a way that anyone would be happy. Just looking at the example you posted, the change would basically completely invalidate all Defense based sets. 45% Def is only achievable to some tank sets without IOs and you'd go to change the damage reduction from 95% to 67.8% basically increasing incoming damage 6 fold. At the same time, the difference between a Tank's Defense (45%) a Scrapper/Brute's with a similar build (36%) would be minimal (67.8% chance to miss vs 65.1% chance to miss), so why play a tank after this? If you add something like Elude (let's say, it's enough to double the values), the numbers are 79% and 75% which is ridiculously low considering that using most resistance based T9s put you at 90% damage reduction. You'd have to change the damage scaling to keep the current balance in a "default" scenario we'd have to pick basically arbitrarily. How would you adjust for level differences? Enemies get a 1.4 accuracy modifier too when they're at +4 so doing that content would become pretty much impossible for any Defense based set as even with an unreasonable amount of buffs (constant 90%+ Defense), you'd still be taking in about 30% of incoming damage and with a more normal amount of Defense buffing, roughly 50% of incoming damage, both of which are worse or on par with most resist based sets without accounting for the enemies' base chance to miss against resistance only characters. Then we introduce rank based accuracy modifiers (1.3 for bosses and EBs, 1.5 for AVs) so a +4 AV would hit a 45% defense character 67% of the time for a ~30% damage reduction which is less than most Tanker resistance sets get unslotted. Might as well rename all Defensive sets to Paper Defense. It's an interesting idea on paper, but making drastic changes to the game balance is most likely a bad idea, and changing things to a new formula just for the sake of change while keeping the same balance as we have now is a huge and largely useless effort. Besides, the soft caps aren't even that great on characters without -Def resistance: anyone shanking you once is going to cause a cascading defense failure and 5 seconds later your build might as well provide you with zero defense.

Can't speak for anyone else, but for me at least planning the builds is part of the fun. I actually like tinkering with Mid's to see what a powerset combination can be stretched to and to me the cap potential of a build is one the main selling points along with the character concept. If I like the character concept and see something in the min/maxed build, it's actually very likely that it will see the light of day especially now that on Homecoming everything is relatively inexpensive. That said, while leveling up I usually follow the 50 build loosely. I'll likely need an extra attack or two while leveling because I don't have the +Rech to run the attack chain I planned or I don't have enough endurance to run the additional toggle I picked from Fighting/Leadership. The leveling up part is basically experimenting so that I can adjust the min/maxed build to my preference: for example, if there's an attack whose animation I particularly dislike, I'll replace it with something else if possible. As far as builds go, I never copy someone else's build directly because I like making my own, but every now and then I'll post my build to ask for feedback or check builds with the same powersets to get new ideas. Doing your own research and adapting the build to what you want it to do is usually the best pick: it increases the significance of the character because it's made by you, plus by making the build you actually learn things so you don't have to be begging for a build export every time you roll a new character.

I had an Ill/Cold back on official servers and it was one of my favorite characters in the whole game. Perma PA made it possible to solo pretty much anything in the game while ice shields, Sleet and Heat Loss make you very useful for teams. Currently in the process of remaking the character, so I'll report back in a few weeks... That said, it was a really hard pick for me between /Cold and /Dark and in the end I mostly picked /Cold because that's what the character had originally.

When leveling up my brute I went for 1 Acc first, then an Endurance. Third slot was another Endurance, Recharge or a Damage depending on the power. You do want to slot for damage as a brute, but it's a lesser priority than on other damage dealer archetypes because of Fury. If we assume you have on average around half fury for a 100% base damage boost, 3 slotting attacks for damage is only going to be a 50% incremental change whereas other ATs would get 100%. Basically, you'll get better returns if you go for acc/end/rech first and then damage.

The Gravitational Anchor recipe is definitely bugged. I stumbled across it weeks ago, put in several bids at a few hundred thousand each and none of them have been filled in the 2 or 3 weeks they've been up, yet the AH displays sales below 1000 inf. The same behavior can be observed on some other items, too. Performance Shifter triple sometimes appears to behave similarly showing sales close to 10 million a piece, but clicking on it again usually reverts the display to the 2-3 million that it actually sells for. Fortunately, the vast majority of the items seem to be displayed accurately.

My first 50, badge hunter and main back on official servers was a Kat/Inv scrapper that I liked (especially after spending billions on IOs), but I didn't actually remake him or any of my other early 50s. I did remake three characters, though, because they had very powerful builds and I really liked the gameplay: TW/Elec brute, Fire/Time corr and an Ill/Cold controller. Once I get these to 50 I intend to play powersets and ATs I didn't play much or at all back then so I have at least a dominator and a warshade coming up.

Generally there seems to be a lot of opportunity to make money. I've gone from ~5mil to about 2 billion and two fully IO'd builds in 4 weeks: started by crafting uncommons that could net me 500k-1mil just from crafting the recipe, moved on to enhancement converters when I had a bigger bankroll and now I'm mostly flipping purples and ATOs for 50-200mil per day depending how many of my lowball bids go through. My current bankroll fortunately affords me a chance to to slow down on my ebilness as the ATO and purple flipping has me operate ~10 sales per day while I have close to 1 billion in bids. Then again, my next character in the pipeline is only level 17 and I estimate his build to cost about 200-300 million depending on how quickly I want to have everything so I don't really need to be making much money right now. Here's a short and rough outline for making big bucks in a matter of days (5M to 100M+ in less than a week): When you have literally almost no money at all: bid ~500 inf on SOs, take what you get instantly and sell to vendors for 10k+. Easiest way to make your first 100k-1Million. When you have a small amount of money (1-10M): find an uncommon recipe that costs <100k while the crafted enhancement sells for ~1 million, I used Crushing Impacts and Thunderstrikes, but there are several other uncommons that can be used. Buy the recipe at the lowest level possible (minimize crafting costs), get the salvage (should be <10k total for an uncommon), craft and list slightly below the going price. With a small bankroll you need to move your stuff to get into the big leagues so getting 500k profit overnight is better than 1mil profit after 3 days. Increase your sales volume as your money situation improves. When you have a modest amount of money (10-20M or more), basically do the same as above, but introduce enhancement converters. Convert to stuff that's generally in demand (Heal, Damage, Defensive sets) and rack up even bigger bucks. After that it's basically just increasing your volume and/or moving to more expensive items.

I do a lot of exemplar-ing so I keep most of set bonuses all the way down to L23. You might want to consider the attuned variants of the enhancements. As far as I know, attuning a set IO causes it to level up and down with you within the limits of the IO set so you keep the set bonuses as low as possible while also getting full enhancement values at level 50. They're also available in the AH at no extra cost because the "bucketing" feature allows you to buy one if the corresponding IO of any level is put up for sale. How do you attune a set IO? I thought AIOs and very rare sets were attuned. AIOs are attuned by default, purples can be but that most likely doesn't do anything for them as the bonuses carry down to level 1 anyway. I haven't tried attuning any regular set IOs I've bought some off the AH: you can search for crafted enhancements and either restrict the level range to 1-1 or look for the ones with a different border. I would assume that using a catalyst on a regular set IO would do this, too, but it's cheaper to buy them attuned rather than get the enhancement and catalyst separately.

I do a lot of exemplar-ing so I keep most of set bonuses all the way down to L23. You might want to consider the attuned variants of the enhancements. As far as I know, attuning a set IO causes it to level up and down with you within the limits of the IO set so you keep the set bonuses as low as possible while also getting full enhancement values at level 50. They're also available in the AH at no extra cost because the "bucketing" feature allows you to buy one if the corresponding IO of any level is put up for sale.

On Homecoming you can select a travel power without prerequisites as early as lvl 4. IIRC, on official servers a veteran reward unlocked the ability to do the same but at level 6.

For me it's the combination of the following: CoX is inherently low stress: in general the gameplay isn't very fast paced and the difficulty is set so that you don't need to focus 100% or have a fully optimized build to finish stuff. Other notable casual gaming benefits: nothing in the game requires voice chat which is sometimes a big plus as well as the fact that one person going AFK for a bit doesn't stop the whole team. On the other end of the spectrum the game allows a significant degree of build optimization if you want to create a demi-god level character capable of silly things like soloing GMs or multiple AVs at once. Cookie cutter builds don't really exist in the sense they do in most other MMOs. Sure, you can pick the FoTM powersets but you can customize it a lot with your own IO build while still being extremely powerful You can create a truly unique character. The character creation has billions of options for different costume/AT/powerset combinations and when you add IO builds and potentially your own backstory to this, you're able to create a character that is literally unique. No holy trinity. Just pick whoever wants to join your team and 99% of the time you're good to go, which allows people to play something they actually enjoy rather than something that allows them to get into teams. Reasonable time commitments. I can hop on for half an hour and progress by doing just about anything or if I have more time, most TFs can be done in an hour. When it comes to long-term achievements, at least on Homecoming you can level up to 50 and fully kit out your character in a matter of weeks. You're never stuck with the class you picked first because everything takes so long that you don't have time to get alts to end-game. No fear of missing out. I absolutely despise that element in many games where you have a million different weekly/daily resets that force a gaming schedule on you if you want to keep up. In CoX it doesn't matter too much if I miss a couple of days worth of gaming because I don't lose a limited chance of progressing. I guess the friendliness towards casuals and hardcore players at the same time is also what makes the community great. In most other MMOs having a teammate with a non-standard build is a detriment to my enjoyment while in CoX a bad build only affects the player using that build most of the time. Basically, I don't have to care at all whether my teammates have optimized builds or if they're using perfected attack chains and that is awesome. Also being able to look like a superhero from the start is great compared to being a space/fantasy hobo until end-game.

Out of those two options, Reactive. The DoT is the biggest benefit from any Interface you can get when it comes to soloing AVs as an equal lvl AV will resist roughly ~85% of any Regen debuff you attempt to slap on them so the small numbers you'd get from an Interface won't do much.

Miracle + Numi = +25% Recovery which is the same as base Stamina. Or to put it the other way around, Miracle +Recovery is slightly better than a lvl 50 EndMod in Stamina while Numina's is roughly equal to it. If you find it worth adding EndMod to Stamina, then Miracle and maybe even Numina would be worth the slots at the very least. The ~15 million combined cost for both on Homecoming is also pretty trivial for anyone with a level 50 character, so I slot those (and a Panacea) on all of my characters as soon as I can so that I can get rid of endurance management. The cost of serums is trivial, but rather than constantly stocking up on them and using them, I prefer paying a fixed sum to never have to worry about it.

Interesting to get back on the pylon tests again, though I'm starting with a TW/Elec Brute: First run: 4 minutes 1 second or 241 seconds for ~287 DPS. Second run: 4 minutes 11 seconds for ~280 DPS. Third run: 3 minutes 57 seconds for ~289 DPS. For attack chain I'm running Arc of Destruction > Crushing Blow > Rend Armor > Follow Through > Crushing Blow where the last Crushing Blow is replaced with Hasten every 2 minutes and Energize + Build Momentum every 30 seconds. Achilles' Heel proc in Rend Armor, Gladiator's Fury -Res in Lightning Field, purple procs in Rend Armor and AoD. Incarnates used: T3 Agility and T3 Degenerative (75% chance for toxic damage). Not quite sure if the attack chain is optimal but it's easy to maintain with the constant interruptions from perma Energize.

This, pretty much. Back at the end of official server era, I always PL'd my characters to 22 to have access to some proper enhancements and I'm doing pretty much the same now. One run of DFB to get to lvl 10 and have more than two powers, then to Hollows or Kings Row, but I suspect it won't take too many alts for me to get to a point where I just skip to 22 as fast as possible because you don't really have too many progression routes sub 20. When it comes to teams, I've so far run two characters to 40+ and it has never taken me more than 10 minutes to gather a full team for whatever I want to do, provided I take the initiative and start the team myself. Social anxiety is a crappy excuse for not doing this especially if you'd be willing to join someone else's team because you don't have to be an outgoing person to start a team. When I lead a team, sometimes I barely interact with anyone beyond inviting them to the team and sometimes I'll join in the chatter, but I know for sure you can hold the star and be quiet if that's what you want to do. Then the only difference between leading the team and joining one is that you'd set the mission once every 15 minutes and occasionally replace a teammate who leaves.

Thank you for your contribution to my inf stockpiles! On a more serious note, I totally understand the mentality because I get the urge to have things right now all the time, but I only allow myself to do that when it's 1-2 enhancements to get a particularly good set bonus (like +7.5% Rech) or if we're talking about the last few enhancements in the build. Other than that, I'll wait because at worst my waiting time is typically 2-3 days. Doing this, I have fully IO'd my first and so far only 50 (perma Hasten, soft cap Ranged/AoE def, all that jazz), stockpiled around 60 ATOs/Purples/LotG +Rech/other uniques for future 50s and gone from <10mil inf to about 1.5 billion in less than three weeks.

Due to the amount of people playing, the items seeded into the market and effective price caps set by the different currency conversions (1,000,000 inf = 1 merit), it's actually extremely unlikely anyone would actually be able to manipulate the market. At best, you can make money off of impatience: people are willing to pay premiums of several millions just so they avoid crafting enhancements or because they want a specific item right now instead of waiting overnight.

I understand it very well. After all, it would be very short sighted and naive to think there's absolutely no problem in having end game content with ten fold differences in their reward rates, even moreso when there aren't appropriate challenge differences between. Good thing is, the rates are going to be changed to 30:1 which still provides an average return of 35-50 merits per 45 mins that is still better than many TFs, but not in a completely different league.

A lot of stuff for ~5M influence, some purples for 10M. Biggest would have been a Ragnarok for 15-20M (bought it for 6), but I decided to keep it for myself because my next character will be able to make good use of it.

Use the marketplace to your advantage. I did that, started with 5million at lvl 30 two weeks ago and I'm at level 50 with 1-1.5 billion influence right now without farming. Here's the basics: [*]Find an enhancement where the recipe + crafting cost is cheaper than the enhancement and turnover is pretty quick (most uncommon damage, defensive and healing sets qualify) [*]Put low'ish bids on said recipe and required salvage, wait overnight if you have to [*]Craft said recipe, put it for sale and get your profits [*]Keep repeating the process and increase your volume as needed until you have enough influence It can be a bit tedious, but it's not rocket science and with pretty much any set IO you can make at least 500k inf a piece. At 5 million I started with stuff I could craft for <500k and sell for 1mil+, more than doubled my influence overnight. Then it was just a matter of increasing volume and starting to bid on some slightly more expensive things with better profit margins. If this sounds like something you can't bother with, you can always do any content that gets you reward merits and just sell rare recipes.

Dark could work for your concept because it can be coloured to look like sand.

This would be completely unnecessary. So far it hasn't taken me over 10 minutes to form a 4+ man team at any level on Torchbearer, so I suspect the issue is either playing on a low population server/shard, or more likely, not taking the initiative to start a non-DFB team yourself. It's not uncommon to see several people looking for a team in the LFG channel for a long time because everyone just wants to tag along. This is the kind of behavior I have a lot of trouble understanding because even though I'm far from the most social player out there, I prefer starting my own teams because I only see upsides to it: I get to choose my own missions = I get merits in addition to XP I get to set the difficulty = don't have to worry about incompetent leaders making things far too easy or hard I can get rid of obnoxious / AFK players Even though you have the star, there'snothing else you absolutely have to do besides choosing a mission every 15 mins or so, quite literally, you have almost no responsibilities. Starting the team usually takes 1 or 2 messages in the LFG channel in the form of "Lvl X team in zone Y doing Z LFM", so that isn't a big effort either.